In Support of Thunderf00t

Until recently, I knew almost nothing about this fellow. I know, I know, he’s super internet famous, but I’m not really all that into YouTube unless someone brings a particular video to my attention on social media, and even then it’s mostly just videos of adorable kittens, or EPIC FAIL vids, or (best of all) adorable kittens caught in the act of epically failing.

Until very recently, I could count the number of his videos I’d ever seen on one hand. My first impression of him was fairly favorable, but he was up against a profoundly laughable opponent at the time. Every other video I’d seen was about the ongoing, ever-deepening rifts in online freethought, and those ranged from depressing to hyperbolic. Recently, though, I’ve been told that he is quite a terrible person, “way over on the ‘guy who generally hates women’ side of the yard.” I’ve also been told, by a close friend, that Dr. F00t has a long history of intellectual dishonesty.

Maybe this is all true, but I’m not particularly inclined to take other people’s negative impressions on as my own, and I believe that people should not be judged solely by the worst (or best) things that they’ve done, but by the general run of their work. Accordingly, I pulled down a complete list of his videos and wrote a script to quickly extract a random sample (about one-tenth) thereof, which is reproduced here:

Over the last couple of days, I have watched them all, and I have to say that my impression of Dr. F00t has gone from tentatively unfavorable to relatively positive. He has an infectious enthusiasm for the natural world and the scientific means and methods of learning more about it, and he uses his professional expertise to help get young people excited about these things. This is all to the good.

On the downside, he also harbors a certain disdain for his intellectual inferiors, and seems more than happy to get into it with someone who possesses only the smallest fraction of his own knowledge and experience. Personally, I’d have sent a well-trained 10th grader after VFX instead of a full-on Ph.D. but hey, somebody had to do it. Oftentimes he would use the ignorant claims of the creationists to springboard into depth on a particular topic (such as radiometric dating techniques) and that somewhat makes up for the fact that he was taking on such weak opponents. I also really liked his take-downs of more worthy opponents, such as the professional pseudo-scientists over at the Discovery Institute.

The really important takeaway here isn’t about Thunderf00t in particular, but rather about the problem of how we tend to come across people and their work products on the internet. If we tend to read about and pay attention to people most often when they come up in the course of a dramatic controversy, this is going to have at least two pernicious effects. Firstly, and most obviously, we’re going to pay an undue amount of attention to people who consistently generate controversy within the community, and tend to miss out on a brilliant few who consistently and conscientiously refuse to do so. Secondly, we are going to have a warped opinion of those whom we’ve only ever sampled in terms of their most controversial contributions. Just as I misunderstimated (thanks GWB for this coinage) the character of Thunderf00t and the utility of his work, so also I am probably doing the same for many people who consider themselves as his opponents, because I’ve only come across them in the course of some dramatic blow-up or another.

Going forward, I’m going to make a concerted effort not to judge people solely in terms of the worst or best things they’ve ever said or done, but rather to gain a broader sense of their personal history and contributions before rushing to judgment. That said, feel free to tell me what glorious achievements or horrifying misogyny that I must have missed in this case. :p

Article by: Damion Reinhardt